


any given tuesday

by clarketomylexa



Category: The 100 (TV)
Genre: Clexa Week 2020, F/F, immortal lexa, time traveller clarke
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-03-04
Updated: 2020-03-04
Packaged: 2021-02-28 19:01:15
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,114
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/23012158
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/clarketomylexa/pseuds/clarketomylexa
Summary: They're a perfect cliche: the time traveller and the immortal who fell in love.Kissing Clarke feels like the ending to a Nicholas Sparks novel and with the pressure of her lips, the entire word slips away.
Relationships: Clarke Griffin/Lexa
Comments: 10
Kudos: 169





	any given tuesday

**Author's Note:**

> happy clexa week day 3!

The coffee shop sits empty between the lunch and breakfast rush.

The hours that Sunday sees filled with eggs benedict and post-yoga chatter is silent on weekday mornings—a ten forty twilight zone in which writers, procrastinators and a single, hassled English Lit major thrive—and Lexa watches from across the street in the rain, fingers wound around the stem of a green umbrella.

It looks undeniably normal from here; the pin-striped awning, the gold letters on the window, the green bulb of the 14th Street station glowing outside it the February gloom. Having given up on customers, the hostess stands behind the counter, sipping an unwanted coffee from a paper cup while the barista is on break. 

It could be any given Tuesday if it weren’t for the time traveller sitting in the corner most booth.

She appears to Lexa in fragments as she crosses the street, the reflection of the walk signal lurid and white in the puddles beneath her feet. Each facet of her—the chipped blue nail polish, the slope of her smile, the shine of a gold hoop earring nestled beneath light hair—finds Lexa in isolation, like a broken Picasso or a dream. 

If it weren’t for the waitress stooped down to clear an empty plate from the table in front of her, Lexa would be tempted to believe she is just that.

A dream. 

It’s been seventy years since Lexa last saw her and she looks exactly the same.

Everything from the way she sits to the way she holds her mug to her lips reminds Lexa of the night they met—of silk and lace and cigarette smoke. The memories are so vivid they set her teeth on edge. 

The café is bigger than she thought it would be when she steps inside—bigger than she’d imagined it to be all of the years she’s stood outside on the pavement, waiting for the right time to go in. The pin-striped booths wrap themselves away around the corner of the counter one side of the restaurant and the wallpaper is light and airy. Lexa drapes the thick wool of her coat over one arm and lifts her hair from the collar of her turtleneck, scanning the restaurant for the figure she saw from outside. 

“Would you like a table?”

When she looks back the waitress is watching her politely.

“No thank you. I’m meeting someone.”

It’s strange to hear herself say the words out loud. She can’t count how many times she’s played out this exact scenario in her head—how many times she’d imagined what she would say or how it would go when she could finally step inside. Now that she’s really here, it doesn’t seem real. 

The waitress disappears and Lexa ventures further into the restaurant, unwrapping her scarf from around her neck. 

She can see her there by the window: elbow resting on the table, a coffee shop pamphlet spread out on its surface, fingers pressed to her temple as she reads. She doesn’t look up when Lexa approaches.

“Clarke.”

Lexa sees the exact moment Clarke registers her: the twitch of the fingers on her left hand where they rest on her fork, the flutter of lashes as she lifts her eyes from her reading and the reddening of her cheeks. When she looks up, the smile on her face is familiar and open. She looks almost relieved.

“You came,” she says, gesturing for Lexa to sit down as casually as if she’d invited Lexa out on a coffee date the night before and it occurs to Lexa quite suddenly that, for her at least, she did.

The thought ignites fears in her belly she hadn’t even considered until now.

She’s been in love with Clarke Griffin since the moment she met her—this blond paradox of a girl with her strange clothes and foreign words. A single night together was all she needed to know that she would tear down the decades to find her again but it’s been so long since then—she’s been so many things to so many people—it’s impossible she’s the same person as the one Clarke left.

Looking at Clarke now, she sees the same girl as she had that night—the same girl who left her alone in an empty bed the morning after with a name, date and address and the words ‘come find me’ on a slip of white paper. She sees a modern sweater over the silky dress she’d worn and her own kisses drying on Clarke’s stained lips and it makes her keenly aware of just how much time has passed.

Is it possible she’s spent the better half of a century clawing her way back to a girl who might not love her back?

The thought seems too awful to bear.

The waitress returns before Lexa can find an answer, placing a stack of pancakes and a milk jug of syrup on the table and Clarke thanks her happily, rearranging the food that’s already there to accommodate it. 

There’s a feast laid out in front of her — eggs, bacon, toast and home fries. When one of the plates doesn’t fit, she shifts a stack of empty ones to the nearby table.

“Sorry,” she gestures to the spread with her fork once she’s finished—eggs, bacon, toast and home fries—and covers her mouth as she chews. “It helps with the nausea.” From travelling, Lexa thinks. She remembers Clarke telling her. “You must get that too?”

Lexa shakes her head. She doesn’t—not nausea at least. There’ll be pain sometimes, deep, ingrained pain in her calves and the backs of her knees as the years sweep past like the outgoing tide—growing pains, Anya calls them, and maybe she’s right—but she can’t blame Clarke for assuming wrong. Time travelling and immortality do seem to inhabit two ends of the same spectrum of existence.

The smile on Clarke’s face falters at Lexa’s answer but doesn’t disappear completely. Instead, it morphs into something deeper. A cavern opens behind her eyes, full of understanding and it dismantles Lexa entirely.

“How long has it been?”

Clarke doesn’t have to explain for Lexa to know what she’s asking. She must know—she must have done the math—but hearing it out loud is what makes it real so Lexa swallows and looks around the empty café before answering. 

“Seventy-four years.” 

Clarke looks like she might cry. 

“I’m sorry I left so quickly,” she says. 

Lexa shakes her head. 

“I’m sorry it took so long to find you.” 

It’s an insensitive joke—the smile Clarke returns to her is one part fondness and two parts disbelief—but it’s been so long now that Lexa feels she’s earned the right to make fun of such things if only to stop her heart from caving under the pressure. 

It had taken two months for her to conclude Clarke Griffin as she appeared to Lexa that night wouldn’t exist for quite some time and another nine before she found any Griffin’s whatsoever within the Continental United States to base her search off of when the time came.

Once she did, it was a waiting game.

Clarke appeared to her everywhere then: in newspapers and history books, framed black and white photographs on mantels and restaurant walls. It seemed that, despite all of her charms, she hadn’t quite picked up on the subtleties of her trade as much as she probably ought to have. 

Either that or nobody knew to look. 

Lexa did though. By 1954, sightings of her had become so frequent Lexa had a collection dedicated to them: magazine clippings stuck with paste to the pages of leather Moleskine and mentions of her name circled in smudged, ballpoint ink in an effort to pinpoint where she would appear next. 

One particularly odd hardback found tucked behind a shelf in a shop claiming to sell ‘Old, Used & Rare Books’ told the story of a blond-haired, blue-eyed bastard niece of a Tudor King who appeared at court for a week before promptly disappearing, leaving the mystery of her identity in her wake. Another — a glossy book of 19th-century photography with a blue fabric cover — printed a portrait taken of her in 1867, colourised in pink, red and baby blue.

It was a comfort if nothing else—collecting that is. 

A lifetime sat between her and the date Clarke had given her that night—an infinite combination of people and places to pass through—and the fear of not making it to the one that mattered was an ever-present companion, the thought of meeting her in the middle the only thing that could soothe it. 

The more she collected, the more solid her plan became, sealing itself like hard clay into her subconscious. She didn’t have to wait. She didn’t have to play this game. She could subvert the universe—intercept her before their time—and it would be OK. 

Looking at Clarke now, Lexa knows how wrong she’d been. 

Aside from the obvious flaws—them being that one: Clarke didn’t have a pattern, and two: any time she encountered Clarke other than the one prescribed was almost certain to end in disaster according to every novel, film and television show that she’s come into contact with since—the knowledge that there was never any path for them other than this one is glaringly obvious in the light of their reunion in the way it never was back then. 

It was fate that led her here—fate, destiny or some wide-eyed combination of the two—just like it was fate that led Clarke to her all those years ago; a self-fulfilling prophecy of which the only outcome could be this moment, so singular and unique in its existence, it could only have been crafted just for them. 

Clarke knows this, too. 

It’s why she’s looking at Lexa like that; an expression so specific and intense Lexa feels it slung through her own body. It’s sad, she thinks—achingly, soulfully sad—but soft too, in a way Lexa hasn’t felt since the night they met since Clarke’s fingers smoothed through her curls and her lips breathed champagne bubbles over her rouged cheeks. 

It makes Lexa—hanging here in front of Clarke by a decades-old promise—scared. 

“Do you want anything to eat?” Clarke asks, nudging the bowl of home fries in Lexa’s direction. She smiles shyly but there’s a tightness around her mouth, a plea in the furrow of her brows that screams for Lexa to say something—anything. 

Lexa doesn’t know how. 

How do you explain to someone that they’re all you’ve ever wanted? How do you tell them that you’re afraid you won’t be the same to them? 

“If it’s no trouble,” she answers eventually and watches the way Clarke’s tense shoulders unravel. 

* * *

Noon sees the lunch crowd filter in—gallery owners and bookstore clerks chased over the twelve o’clock streets by the rising sun—but no one notices the reunion taking place in the corner of the café, the two of them cinched together over the tabletop, as if by some invisible, decades-old string.

It’s weathered this string. It has borne the brunt of so much heartache—so many years of waiting—but it’s still pulled just as tight between her own heart and Clarke’s as it was seventy-four years ago and it gives Lexa hope that they will be OK.

“No!” Clarke groans, cheeks red as she pours over the photograph in her hands. It was already an artefact when Lexa found it at an estate sale in Long Island back in 1994 but now the thick, white border and it’s spidery blue caption— _Rebecca’s Birthday, October 1976_ —is yellowed and the corners are creased from being handled. “Tell me I didn’t look like that!”

“I think the bell-bottoms are fetching,” Lexa smiles innocently, playing with the damp string of her teabag.

She loves watching the way Clarke talks; loves hearing the cadence of her voice and seeing the way her lips quirk. It’s the little things that disappear when all you have to remember someone by are captured likenesses and the relief that Lexa feels at being able to piece Clarke back together into a whole person again is so strong it’s almost physical.

“No one looks good in bell-bottoms,” Clarke shakes her head in disgust and Lexa laughs.

“Tell that to the person who lived through them.”

As soon as the words are free of her lips, Lexa wishes she hadn’t said them. Wishes they’d stayed trapped inside of her alongside every other dark, unpleasant thought she’s ever had but, try as she might, she can’t claw them back. All she can do is watch Clarke’s shoulders tighten, her face still.

“I’m sorry,” Lexa whispers, brow tightened under the weight of her guilt.

She wonders how much longer they’re going to have to do this dance; if they’re going to spend their entire lives tiptoeing and avoiding the obvious.

Clarke shakes her head, dismissing her apology gently.

“It’s so old.”

Her voice is serious now as she smooths her thumb over the photograph, tracing the lines worn into the cardstock as delicately as if they were veins beneath skin.

It must be strange, Lexa thinks, to see oneself captured in such a way. The Clarke in the photograph—an anonymous blond figure in the background of the picture—looks the same age as the Clarke sitting before her now. To her, this can’t have been more than a few months ago. To the world, it’s been over four decades.

“I’ve had it for a long time,” Lexa replies as Clarke slides it back over the table, avoiding the stack of dirty plates yet to be taken away. Their fingers catch across yellowed cardstock and the feeling—raw and electric—lingers on Lexa’s skin well after Clarke has retracted her hand to search for something in her bag 

She watches Clarke search for a moment, frowning into its depths before pulling out a photograph of her own—this one glossy and new, the edges crisp and the ink fresh.

Lexa’s breath trips.

It’s her.

It’s her the night they met; the pale lace of her own dress, among a sea of dark evening jackets and silky, low-slung gowns, the curls of her own cropped hair, caught in mid-flight as she turned to face the direction of the camera.

It’s the moment she first laid eyes on Clarke all those years ago, rendered her forever as vivid as it had had been then, and it’s so sudden, Lexa thinks she might cry.

Heat—thick and aching builds up behind her eyes. Her lips tremble.

She hasn’t seen a picture of herself in years. 

“This was…” 

“Last night,” Clarke shrugs helplessly, reaching forward over dirty dishes and cold tea to brush a thick lock of hair off of Lexa’s forehead. “You grew out your hair. 

Lexa laughs at that; she’s done so many things since then, how perfectly Clarke of her to point out a change of such little consequence. How perceptive of her to smooth over Lexa’s fears with so few words. “I like it.”

* * *

“You live here?” 

Clarke stares in wonderment at the crown moulding and elaborate bannisters of the hallway nestled at the top of a walk-up West of the park. 

Lexa knows what she’s thinking: rent here can’t be cheap. And it isn’t, or it wouldn’t be, if not for Anya. 

Anya who’s doorstep Lexa appeared on twenty-eight years ago with nothing more than a suitcase and the name of her dead uncle to convince her to help her. 

Anya who’s taught Lexa more about life in those twenty-eight years alone than Lexa’s learnt herself in all of the years she’s been alive. 

“A friend put me onto it,” she explains, fishing the key out of her pocket and holding the door open for Clarke to step inside. 

The apartment hasn’t changed much since Lexa moved in in the mid-nineties: it’s small but tidy with a long, skinny kitchen and her bed tucked into the U of the bay window. Her furniture is classic and clean, all estate-sale or Goodwill finds, antique armchairs and old, revarnished tables. If she’s learned anything over the years, it’s that leaning into trends leaves her with nothing but horribly outdating possessions—she still shivers when she thinks about the lava lamp and awful brown-and-mustard lounge set she’d acquired somewhere around 1975—so she sticks to simplicity instead. Bold colours are kept to a minimum. 

“It’s beautiful,” Clarke marvels, running her fingers over the stems of the books lining the living room walls; rows of them stacked neatly on their shelves like little soldiers conscripted into Lexa’s one-woman war against boredom. 

She picks one up—a first edition of H. G. Wells’ _The Time Machine_ with its beige cover and embossed title—and smiles at Lexa from the corner of her eye, bottom lip caught between her teeth. 

“You’ve been thinking about me.” 

It’s a statement, not a question.

It’s true regardless.

“Always.”

Clarke flashes her a cheeky smile, lip caught between her teeth as she slots the book back into place. It settles against the wood with a dull thud. Lexa watches the progression of Clarke’s fingers down the shelf. 

They stop at the spine of a worn, black journal, pulling it from its perch before Lexa can stop her and Lexa feels her heart evacuate her chest. 

Its cover is blank save shiny fingerprints worn into the thick leather from years of handling, and a single strip of white paper taped to it with peeling scotch tape. It only takes Clarke a second to recognise her own writing. The note she left seventy-four years ago, last night.

“You kept it?”

Lexa nods.

“Yes.”

She watches Clarke leaf through the pages, watches her take in the photographs and the articles, the timelines drawn in shaky ink. The notes scribbled in the margins of newspaper clippings and speculations about mysterious blue-eyed blonds. 

There are journal entries in there too, Lexa knows. Dated from 1946 until now. Tiny paragraphs of life between all of the waiting.

When Clarke looks up at her there are tears in her eyes. Her voice is so thick, she almost can’t speak.

“You waited for me. All this time.”

Lexa swallows. Did Clarke think she’d do anything else? 

A shaky breath pulls her out of her thoughts. There are tears on the tip of Clarke’s nose. 

“I didn’t expect you to do this…” 

She shakes her head, looking upward, blinking tears off her lashes.

“I never thought I’d be someone worth waiting for.”

“You’re the only person that’s ever mattered,” Lexa replies, so quickly it shocks her.

It’s a truth she feels down to her bones. One etched into her existence. The knowledge that they’ll always find each other. That they’re all that matters.

She wobbled sometimes. It’s been so many years there’s no surprise she doubted it but that doesn’t make it any less true. 

Suddenly, Clarke is everywhere at once. 

Her fingers are in Lexa’s hair, her lips are on Lexa’s jaw, her entire being is a flurry of movement so intense it sets Lexa alight like kindling to a flame. Lexa kisses back with just as much intensity—a desperate kind of decades-old need, nurtured and tended to with gentle hands—her heart beating frantically in her chest. 

There’s a distant thunk; the journal falls to the rug beneath their feet. 

Lexa’s fingers map their way along Clarke’s cheeks, down her neck, along her shoulders, under her jaw, remembering lost textures and the way it feels to be kissed. After so long without it—so long fantasizing and wishing, hoping and praying—it’s a sensation so strong it makes her dizzy. 

She can hardly think. 

She can hardly breathe. 

Clarke tastes like rich, dark coffee and syrup and, beneath that, champagne. She breathes hot breathes along Lexa’s cheek and her fingers rake desperately over Lexa’s stomach beneath her clothes, nails clawing at the layers of thick wool until her coat spills off her shoulder and stumbles backward until she feels her mattress give beneath her buckling knees. 

She sits. 

For a moment, Clarke hangs there above her as if suspended by some greater force. Lexa can smell the sweetness of her perfume and traces of herself trapped in the folds of her clothes. Can see the tiny baby hairs at her hairline and the pretty flush on her cheeks. 

She’s crying, Lexa thinks. Her eyes are wide and shiny, a watercolour shade of blue because Lexa is crying too: hot, wet tears she can feel dripping down the valley of her face and when she reaches shaking fingers up to wipe them away, Clarke catches them, her own fingers curling under the shelf of her jaw, her own thumb brushing them away. 

Lexa blinks against the feeling and swallows the sob caught halfway between her heart and her mouth. 

Oh, God. 

This is real. 

She’s here. 

It’s enough to spur her onward as she leans forward, eyes still closed as she slips a hand around the back of Clarke’s neck and pulls her down to the mattress.

* * *

When Lexa wakes, it’s dark. 

Properly dark now, not the four o’clock half-light that still shocks her to this day despite having lived through twenty-eight Winters in this city. 

The curtains are open above her, slinging puddles of watery moonlight over the floor, the rug, the corner of a bookcase. An oblong patch of light illuminates the edge of the mattress and only then does Lexa realise she’s alone in bed, the sheets draped haphazardly over her bare body. It makes her heart trip. 

Had it all been a dream? 

It’s a thought that has the power to shatter her completely.

It’s a thought that has the power to shatter her entirely. She’s dreamt of such things before but never quite as vivid as this, never with so much detail and feeling but still, she supposes, stranger things have happened. Cold seeps in through every crack in her heart. She wants to cry. 

She runs a hand over her face, over her hair and down the back of her neck until she hits a bruise, a pleasant ache in the dip of her collarbone that simmers beneath her skin like champagne bubbles and it’s enough to drive her fears away. 

She hadn’t dreamt it.

A moment later the toilet flushes, a chink of yellow light skittering across the hardwood and Clarke pads back to bed, curling herself around Lexa’s prone body like she’s fit there all of her life. A hand fastens itself around Lexa’s bare waist. 

_I’m here_ , it says and the tension coiled through her ebbs away like the tide. 

_I love you_ , it says and Lexa sleeps without dreams.

* * *

The second time she wakes is a far more pleasant affair.

The cold of the night has retreated to the furthest corners of her mind and the curtains and closes against the morning sun, bathing them in warm orange and pales yellows. 

When Lexa looks up, Clarke is there. The weight of her, sitting cross-legged on the end of the bed with Lexa’s oxford short draped snugly around her shoulders, is firm and grounding. 

After so many years of waking up alone, the shock of Clarke being there leaves her momentarily dumbfounded. For all of her waiting and wishing, all of her planning their reunion in her mind's eye, she has exactly no idea how they’ll navigate this from here on out.

In the past, it’s a thought which would have scared her half to death but she feels at peace with it now. Surely the hard part is over? Nothing that happens now can scare her any more than the thought of never seeing Clarke again had for so many years.

“You know I would call you a stalker but this is actually kind of flattering,” Clarke murmurs, sensing her movements. 

Lexa sits up, sheets pooling around her waist and drapes herself over Clarke’s back. When Clarke sinks her head comfortably into the crook of her neck, she smiles. Clarke has the journal open in her lap. She runs her hands over the veins of ink and brittle paper. 

“You’re the one who upped and left me for seventy-four years,” Lexa argues. “What was I supposed to do?”

“Take up knitting,” Clarke suggests, pressing a kiss to the underside of her jaw and Lexa grins. 

“Oh, I did.”

“You did not!” 

“I’ll have you know I was quite the handi-crafts woman.” 

Clarke sighs contentedly against her. 

“I’ll have to hold you to that.”

**Author's Note:**

> come talk to me on tumblr if you want to ([@clarketomylexa](https://clarketomylexa.tumblr.com/)) otherwise thanks for reading!


End file.
